Popular Decorah-based potter, illustrator brings her designs to textiles

Elisabeth Maurland’s pillows and tea towels will be for sale at Fancy Pants in Decorah April 4-5, during Women’s Weekend Out. Maurland’s designs grace her handmade pottery, as well as greeting cards and art prints.

A perennial favorite on the annual Northeast Iowa Artists’ Studio Tour, Elisabeth Maurland’s beautiful handmade pottery is prized as much for the colorful, whimsical, handpainted illustrations with which she decorates each piece, as it is for its delicate form.

Collectors of Maurland’s work who may have wished her illustrations graced other objects, as well, are about to have their wish come true: The Norway-born artist recently began putting her designs onto tea towels and pillows.

And that’s just the beginning.

“Next I think will be totebags,” Maurland says. “Later on, table runners and cloth napkins. Maybe rugs. There are a lot of options.”

Maurland says she decided to look into putting her designs on textiles after her daughter, Julia, was born nine years ago.

“On my pots I painstakingly paint every single dot and draw every single line by hand, after I have manually created the surface on which to paint and draw them,” she says.

“I thought some kind of machine should be able to print this on something else. But I knew nothing about it and it has taken this long to learn how to produce the designs on a printable surface (I ended up learning Adobe Illustrator), where to get fabric printed and sewn and how to market it.”